Boot Methods

It used to be that booting a PC-compatible system didn't involve very many choices -- there was only one way to do it. All of our desktops and servers had a standard BIOS, all our hard drives used Master Boot Records, and were partitioned using the MBR partition scheme. Then, along came EFI and UEFI, which are new-style firmware designed to boot systems, along with GPT partition tables to support disks larger than 2.2TB. All of the sudden, we then had a variety of options to boot Linux systems, turning what once was a one-method-fits-all approach into something a lot more complex.

BIOS + GRUB (MBR)

Note

This option is the "classic" way to boot Funtoo Linux and uses traditional MBR partitions, which have existed since the origin of the PC. This method is detailed in our Install Guide.

Here is the typical disk layout:

MBR (master boot record) at beginning of boot disk

MBR partition 1, /dev/sda1 is the /boot filesystem (typically ext2)

MBR partition 2, /dev/sda2 is swap.

MBR partition 3, /dev/sda3 is the / (root) filesystem.

Here's how the boot process works:

The system BIOS loads the MBR from your boot disk (containing stage1 of the GRUB boot loader) and runs it.

Extra boot-related code is loaded by the GRUB stage1 from the /boot filesystem on the disk.

Now, the boot loader is able to run and load the Linux kernel and initramfs, and start Funtoo Linux.

BIOS + GRUB (GPT)

This is a more modern way to boot Linux. It uses MBR for booting but uses the more modern GPT partition scheme. Here's the disk layout: